This is why the PS3 needs to win this gen

[Bodhesatva]

rocketpig said:
I disagree with this thread on many levels but I'll only attack one point:

Some games are art. Team ICO's games are a perfect example. As was Half-Life. And I expect Bioshock to follow in their footsteps. Hell, even Tetris could be argued as art in some form or another.

What do these games have in common? Immersive, complex, and engaging gameplay. It doesn't matter if it's on the Wii, the PS3, or an old damned Commodore 64. As long as there are developers out there attempting to challenge the way the world views video games and how you interact with those games, there will be art in this industry.

When it comes to art, story often doesn't matter. Neither does style. In fact, the only damned thing that matters in art is user/viewer/reader reaction. Without it, nothing is challenged. The greatest painting in the universe wouldn't matter for dick if no one ever saw it, touched it, or thought long and hard about it. People who claim one thing is art but not another are usually shallow, pretentious, and terribly boring. And this is coming from a professional illustrator who spent most of his formative years studying various forms of art and applying the principles used in his own art. Art can be drawn from anything. Art IS everything. The visceral feel is what matters; not style, story, or canvas.

Remember one thing: art is completely subjective. What you view as a masterpiece is crap in another's eyes. Just ask me some time what I think about Picasso. I could write you a 20 page paper on how he influenced the art world for the worse. That doesn't mean I'm right but it also doesn't mean I'm wrong. Art is subjective. It's completely up to the individual.

As an avid Art History buff, I very much disagree with a lot of this. Just as you probably have some fairly nasty things to say, I'll avoid any serious flames, but I will make one point:

I do agree that art is extremely hard to define, but I do believe that reasonable people can reasonably agree. In fact, everything follows this: you can't prove I exist, as it's theoretically possible that a computer sitting in a very, very windy room happens to be turning on and having the buttons pressed by gusts of wind in the precise order necessary to open up and type this post. That's possible... but reasonable people can reasonably agree that's unlikely. Similarly, when almost all serious art critics agree that something is one of the most important works of art of all time, or that something is utter garbage, that general consensus of reasonable and educated people generally means something. Not always, but usually.

But this is a minor difference: I do think that art has some concrete form, but I also agree that form isn't absolute. In other words, I certainly wouldn't subscribe to your particular form of Dadaism, but I also wouldn't insist that art could be defined by a single blurb in a dictionary.